Alberto Carpinteri

George C. Sih

G. Surace

The last decade has seen a significant growth in the processing and fabrication of advanced composite materials. This volume contains the up-to-date contributions of those with working experience in the automotive, marine, aerospace and construction field. Starting with modern technologies concerned with assessing the change in material microstructure in terms of the processing parameters, methodologies are offered to account for tradeoffs between the fundamental variables such as temperature and pressure that control the product quality. The book contains new ideas and data, not available in the open literature.

Applications to the Automotive, Marine, Aerospace and Construction Industry

Advanced Technology for Design and Fabrication of Composite Materials and Structures

The book explores the two opposite natural trends of composite systems: (i) order and structure emerging from heterogeneity and randomness, and (ii) instability and chaos arising from simple nonlinear rules. Providing insights into the rapidly growing field of complexity sciences, the book focuses on the role of complexity in fracture mechanics. It firstly discusses the occurrence of self-similarity and fractal patterns in deformation, damage, fracture, and fragmentation of heterogeneous materials and the apparent scaling of the nominal mechanical properties of disordered materials, as well as of the time-to-failure after fatigue and creep loading. Then the book addresses criticality in the acoustic emissions from damaged structures and tectonic faults. Further, it examines the snap-back instability in the structural behavior of relatively large composite structures in the framework of catastrophe theory, and lastly describes the transition toward chaos in the dynamics of cracked elements.

One Century since Griffith’s Milestone

Fracture and Complexity

In this volume a survey of the most relevant nonlinear crack models is provided, with the purpose of analyzing the nonlinear mechanical effects occurring at the tip of macrocracks in quasi-brittle materials - such as concrete, rocks, ceramics, polymers, high-strength metallic alloys - and in brittle-matrix fibre-reinforced composites. Such local effects, as, for example, plastic deformation, yielding, strain-hardening, strain-softening, mechanical damage, matrix microcracking, aggregate debonding, fibre bridging, fibre slippage, crazing, and so on, are properly described through different simplified models, representing the peculiarities of the phenomena involved. The models are introduced and described separately and then compared in the last part of the book. This volume will be of interest to students, professionals and researchers in the field of nonlinear fracture mechanics.

Alberto Carpinteri

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